Girls team. Coach has us doing 3xmile at 5k pace with 2 minute rest. Our season goes until December.
First of all, aren’t mile reps too long for a VO2 max interval for girls especially? No one’s current 5k pace is even sub 6:00.
Second, is this an appropriate workout this early in the season? Seems like a bit much.
No it’s not too long for you, also it doesn’t matter what gender is running this workout. What does sub 6:00 pace have to do with it? Is you coach forcing you to run sub 6 min miles? Just run your 5K pace for the workout. Vo2 workouts can really be sprinkled in anywhere in the training cycle and are fine as long as you aren’t running them every week for weeks on end.
I'm guessing OP has some sort of familiarity with Daniels. I tend to follow his recommendation of keeping vo2max-type intervals to 5 minutes or under. I don't think that needs to be a hard, fast rule, but I find we can get good enough workouts starting with 600s and building toward 1200s. Sometimes we don't go above 1000s for race pace workouts, depending on how many weeks without races we have.
One important note is that 100% vo2max pace is around 3200 pace. For some of the slower runners, it might be closer to 1600 pace. That means you can go a bit longer at 5k pace than Daniels would say you can go for a vo2max workout.
In short, it's not something I would do, but I don't think it's inherently stupid. My runners are doing 1k-2k tempos intervals and 600s at race pace this time of year. Other coaches do other things and get results, though.
We run them for weeks on end. The 6 mins is important because I thought you weren’t supposed to do VO2 max intervals of more than 3-5 minutes.
All we do is stuff like this. All year. I really don’t want everyone to be injured again so I’m trying to figure out if this training is normal. We don’t do LT runs either? Workouts are only ever really hard.
I'm guessing OP has some sort of familiarity with Daniels. I tend to follow his recommendation of keeping vo2max-type intervals to 5 minutes or under. I don't think that needs to be a hard, fast rule, but I find we can get good enough workouts starting with 600s and building toward 1200s. Sometimes we don't go above 1000s for race pace workouts, depending on how many weeks without races we have.
One important note is that 100% vo2max pace is around 3200 pace. For some of the slower runners, it might be closer to 1600 pace. That means you can go a bit longer at 5k pace than Daniels would say you can go for a vo2max workout.
In short, it's not something I would do, but I don't think it's inherently stupid. My runners are doing 1k-2k tempos intervals and 600s at race pace this time of year. Other coaches do other things and get results, though.
i just got the book and i cant do phase 2. it says to do it before school/in the summer. i didn’t know about this then. i theoretically could do it now/have time, but i have to do my hs coach’s nonsensical all-out...
…that this is a completely inappropriate workout for HS runners of either gender that are not advanced enough for a repeat of that length.
There is also a limit to how many VO2max workouts you can do while still having any room to improve. At some point there is a plateau and you can’t continue improving VO2max without a reset.
Girls team. Coach has us doing 3xmile at 5k pace with 2 minute rest. Our season goes until December.
First of all, aren’t mile reps too long for a VO2 max interval for girls especially? No one’s current 5k pace is even sub 6:00.
Second, is this an appropriate workout this early in the season? Seems like a bit much.
No it’s not too long for you, also it doesn’t matter what gender is running this workout. What does sub 6:00 pace have to do with it? Is you coach forcing you to run sub 6 min miles? Just run your 5K pace for the workout. Vo2 workouts can really be sprinkled in anywhere in the training cycle and are fine as long as you aren’t running them every week for weeks on end.
5k pace isn't really vo2 max anyway, but it's close enough (around 90-95%) to still get a fairly good stimulus.
Mile repeats would probably be the furthest I'd go for a 5k paced workout, but I'd definitely have more than 2 minutes rest (probably more like 5 minutes, just to make sure I'm keeping it controlled).
My advice would be to just threshold them, and ignore your coach's instructions to push hard.